What Ready Player One Tells us about the Virtual and Real World

On your marks, get set, go! And the whole world is thrown into a frenzy. 3D glasses, check; bodysuit, check; treadmill, check; and all is set to begin the journey into a dystopia in the year 2045.

Ready, Player One is a science fiction and adventure that was first published as a book in 2011 by Ernest Cline and then released as a movie in 2018. Given the current trend of the gaming industries worldwide, we dare say that this movie, Ready Player One is just giving us a hint of what is to come in the future.

A virtual-reality game that has almost all the cast being players depicts the possibility of a world of gamers. All one needed was an avatar, and with that, one could be anything or anyone they wanted to be and go anywhere they want to go.

The oasis, as this game was called, was a place where the people usually went to escape the reality of their problems and to just be able to survive life. It was loaded with cool artifacts and gadgets that any player could purchase whether to the real world or the virtual world as they earned coins from playing and being a part of the game.

The quest for the easter egg, which would make one the sole inheritor of the game creator’s fortune saw the players making moves and decisions both in the real world and the virtual world just to be able to call this fortune theirs.

James Halliday, the creator of the game, had hidden clues to unravel where exactly the egg was inside in various sections of his story and it was only by perusing and critically dissecting the life of James Halliday that any player could come across any of the clues.

James Halliday easter Egg in Ready Player one

After first starting off as just a game, the oasis became more addictive as the artifacts begin to get better and better, the graphics more thrilling, and the urge to win even fiercer.

This we see, also happens in our world today. Ready Player One shows a lot of possibilities the world could take on in the gaming industry and a lot of things also happening among our gamers now. For example, it shows to what lengths gamers go just to buy artifacts and the physical and psychological effects it can have on an individual.

The ready player one movie depicts the power a combination of a run-wild imagination and 3D graphics holds over the minds, intellectuals, and emotions of a player as it seeks to make them think that something which isn’t is. The oasis had no way of even satisfying the hunger or thirst of the players as we witness them literally spend all their time and sometimes money there just to win a virtual egg and lay their hands on the game creator’s fortune.

Due to the hardship and chaos in the world now, a little array of hope whether real or not would draw a crowd to itself. Just as we see now, the rise in digitization and the increasing numbers in the gaming industry leaves the possibility of an oasis world very wide open. But just as the creator of the game, James Halliday, said, “REALITY IS REAL”.

So no matter how real the virtual world may look or feel, reality is the only real there ever would be. And we would be daily constrained to return to face this reality, regardless of the amount of time we may spend in the virtual world, as we would have to need to sleep, eat or ease one’s self.

We, therefore, need to start making conscious efforts to stay in touch with reality and find solutions to our problems in the real world rather than looking for an escape out.

We also need to cultivate the habit of growing our physical social network and reduce the amount of time we spend on technology so that we won’t have to face the problem of returning to the real world after hours of gaming just to realize we really have no one in our space as happened to James Halliday.

Steven Spielberg, the director of the movie hinted at the production of the second part of this book, Ready Player two, being in the pipeline and viewers are ecstatic as to how things would play out since it would be a continuation of first part of the movie.

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